Coaching Lessons from an MCC

Coaching Lessons From an MCC

The SF chapter of the ICF hosted a special event with Lyssa deHart, an MCC based in Washington. I’ve only recently discovered what a wealth of coaching knowledge Lyssa is. As you may know, the ICF released a new exam for coaches who want to attain an ICF credential. That exam has thrown some people for a loop because it’s quite different than the former version and seen to be more difficult.

Lyssa created material to help coaches prepare for the exam and it’s super helpful.

So, knowing that she’s a coaching expert, I jumped at the chance to attend her online session about coaching to the competencies.

I am going to share the key takeaways I got from the session. (The session was not recorded.)

1. Coaching is about partnering with your client. It’s not about performance or perfection. Hmm, this is important. As coaches, we have performance anxiety when facing a brand-new client, a high-level client who’s paying a lot for our coaching, and when thrust into a tricky situation such as a client who’s not doing well.

At times like these, we are thinking hard about how we can perform better as a coach. Well, according to Lyssa, it’s not about performance. It’s about partnership. What I took this to mean is that you must be fully present with your client and focused on them – not you. Interestingly, this is one of the secrets to advanced public speaking: Focus on the audience.

When you are focused on partnering with your client, you’re not as worried about asking just the right question, or following a process to a T. instead, you’re hearing what they are saying, observing how they are showing up in the moment, and letting the next question or statement from you bubble up.

We’re also not worried about being perfect. Coaching is an imperfect medium because neither side really knows where it’s going. It just is. How can a free form organic conversation be perfect? It can’t. But, you could try to make it so by forcing it to go a certain way. You could time your check in exactly at the halfway point. You could start to wrap it up in the same way every time. You could ask mostly questions that are deemed to be the absolute best and so on.

The ICF says that PCC doesn’t stand for perfect certified coach. Don’t aim for perfection or performance. Aim to partner with your client. Be there for them every single time as a caring thought partner who believes in them and is sincerely interested in helping them to reach the outcome they desire through challenging, evocative and insightful conversation.

2. Notes may be getting in the way. I take notes. I love my reMarkable tablet and use it with just about every coaching session. Lyssa pointed out that notetaking may be getting in the way of partnering with your client.

You can’t really focus on two things at once – your client and your notes. The more notes you take, the less focused you are on your client.

This was definitely a challenge for me. I vowed to give it a try. One week in I can say that it is liberating and scary at the same time. What’s interesting is that I almost have what feels like an expansion of the space in the coaching session because I’m not taking some of the time to write notes. Instead, I’m just focusing on my client and really listening intently to every word they’re saying.

What may have been my best session of the week was the one where my client went audio only because their camera was broken. With just our voices and no notes – which would have been easy to take with no camera on – I was really connecting with them. I felt the insights we both had in the session were significant.

What I do intend to do is to take notes after sessions if there’s something I feel I want to capture and may forget.

3. Record your sessions with your clients and later map them to the ICF Core Competencies. I’m not doing this now. I have my credential. But, that doesn’t mean I couldn’t learn more and get better by doing the work of analyzing my coaching afterwards. Lyssa does this a lot and makes many coaching sessions available on her YouTube channel. She recommended a tool called Raenotes to use to analyze your sessions against the competencies. I’m giving this some thought and thinking about how I can do this. Since I want to go to MCC, it’s a good idea.

4. MCCs focus their coaching on the person while ACCs and PCCs may focus their coaching on the problem. Lyssa said that MCCs often coach the person and not the problem. Why? It’s more powerful. (These are my words.)

Said another way (in my words again), just about anyone can partner with a person to help them solve their problem, but only a few can help them figure out what’s really going on inside of them in encountering this problem.

What’s really going on here? I believe Lyssa said those words to help us understand what an MCC does in their coaching sessions.

Back to my words now… What’s really going on and what does it mean to you? How will you change as a result of this? Or how are you being changed as you think about this?

Yes, you can coach as an MCC does now if you decide to focus more of your coaching effort on the person you’re partnering with and not the problem they present you with.

Hope this is helpful to you! Want to learn more about changes? Read our article on, “One simple change that could positively affect your coaching business.“

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